Angus Wilson

Sir Angus Wilson shot to fame in the late 1940s his first stories were greeted by Sean OFaolain and Evelyn Waugh alike with delight. He was championed at once as an odd realist providing new social maps of post-war England V S Pritchett was to see him as revising the conventional picture of English Character, and recovering broadness without losing humanity. He has many faces as a writer. If he inherits the comic Dickensian novel of social depth and density, he also marries this to a recognisably modern anxiety and insecurity about the self. Wilsons major books often concern creative breakdown: they depict people who undergo a crisis and/or collapse of self-belief, and then have to find the courage to invent themselves anew.